Keeping Your Focus on the Task at Hand

A friend of mine commented on the post about fiddling with formats that I wrote several days ago. He said that he just used HTML when he wanted to get a page to look the way he wanted. I understand that I always have that option but I view it kind of like I do writing a program.

When it comes right down to it, I can always write my programs in machine language. Then I can get the machine to do exactly what I want. Only I can’t really do that any more. The programs that I want to write have become too complicated for me to write them in machine language. It would make a task that I would spend an hour on in a high level language take days. And tasks that I might spend a week on in Python might take months to get right in machine language.

Not only is there the issue of sheer effort but there is also the fact that because it takes so long to solve a problem at all in machine language, I would be way less likely to spend the time on tweaking it and refining it than I would if it were written in a higher level language.

And finally, there is the heart of the matter. I’m not really looking for the most efficient solution, I’m looking for an adequate solution. I want to think about the problem domain not the intricacies of mapping the problem domain onto the bare metal of the computer. I like my abstractions, thank you.

What this means when it comes to the analogy with WordPress is concerned is that WordPress gives me a consistent layout and lets me concentrate on writing. I am as adept with HTML and CSS and jQuery and JavaScript and all the various mechanisms used to render the incredible web content that we have all come to take for granted. But developing web content that way is hard work. And when I sit down to write a blog post, I want to expend the bulk of my effort on writing.

Hence, I use WordPress. I could embed raw html to achieve my layout goals within WordPress. But then I would have to remember how I did it every time and I would, in all likeliness, not achieve the consistence of layout that I am striving for. I’d rather find a consistent solution that someone else has written that is 80% of what I’m looking for than to have to implement it myself.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.